The Father's Game (novel)

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Das Vaterspiel is a novel by the Austrian writer Josef Haslinger , which was published in 2000 by S. Fischer Verlag and filmed in 2009 by Michael Glawogger under the same title .

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Rupert Kramer, called Ratz, is 35, single, a geek and a failure.

In November 1999 he received a call from Mimi, his childhood sweetheart, in New York City : She needed his manual skills and he didn't have to do anything he didn't want. Kramer sees this not only as a chance for a romantic adventure, but also to bring his father-annihilation game onto the market in America. So he brings his cat Alexandr to his mother and makes his way to Frankfurt am Main , where a plane is waiting for him.

While Kramer drives alone in his car and struggles with the snow-covered road, the reader learns about the story of his family: from his social democratic father in Vienna and his rise to the position of Minister of Transport, from his mother's “black” parents in Scheibbs and the resulting ones resulting problems, from the love life of his sister Klara and of course from Kramer's own childhood and becoming a man, from his student days, when he met Mimi, and from his increasing aversion to his father, who was in his affair with someone else (Kramer only calls her "the Schnepfe ”) and the following separation of the parents culminates and gives him the impetus for the development of his father annihilation game.

The more or less ongoing plot is woven into the reports of the Lithuanian Jew Jonas Shtrom in the form of three minutes of his testimony to the Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Violent Crimes from 1959 and a testimony to the Office of Special Investigations in the Justice Department in Washington, DC eight years later. The reports paint a terrifyingly accurate picture of the persecution of Jews in Lithuania during the Second World War , during which Jonas Shtrom lost his entire family. With his statements he aims to arrest two of his main tormentors, SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger and Algis Munkaitis.

In the book, however, these two storylines remain without any apparent connection for the time being.

When Kramer finally arrives in New York, Mimi tells him the real reason for his trip: Her grandmother has kept her brother Lucas Kralikauskas, a former Nazi criminal, hidden in her cellar for 32 years to protect him from prosecution; Kramer should now expand his hiding place. At first he is strictly against it, but he lets Mimi persuade him and begins the renovation work. Incidentally, by chance, he found a potential business partner in New York, with whose help he succeeded in marketing his father-annihilation game online, and shortly afterwards he was making huge financial profits with it.

On Christmas Eve Kramer finished the renovations and he learns that Lucas Kralikauskas and Algis Munkaitis are one and the same person. A short time later he received a call from his mother in Austria: his father had killed himself.

Kramer returns to Austria and at the memorial service learns about his father's financial problems, which apparently led to his suicide. But Kramer sees a laptop in his former children's room and suspects that his father came across the father-annihilation game on the Internet and that this was the real trigger.

filming

In 2009, director Michael Glawogger filmed the book under the title Das Vaterspiel with Helmut Köpping as Rupert Kramer, Sabine Timoteo as Mimi Kralikauskas and Ulrich Tukur as Jonas Shtrom.

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